A Texas Cowboy

Description

After a nomadic childhood, Charles Siringo signed on as a teenage cowboy for the noted Texas cattle king, Shanghai Pierce, and began a life that embraced all the hard work, excitement, and adventure readers today associate with the cowboy era. He “rid the Chisholm trail,” driving 2,500 heads of cattle from Austin to Kansas; knew Tascosa—now a historic monument—when it was home to raucous saloons, red light districts, and a fair share of violence; and led a posse of cowboys in pursuit of Billy the Kid and his gang.

First published in 1885, Siringo’s chronicle of his life as a itchy-footed boy, cowhand, range detective, and adventurer was one the first classics about the Old West and helped to romanticize the West and its myth of the American cowboy. Will Rogers declared, “That was the Cowboy’s Bible when I was growing up.”

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Introduction by Richard W. Etulain
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text

A Texas Cowboy
I. My Boyhood Days
II. My Introduction to the late war
III. My First Lesson in Cow Punching
IV. My second experience in St. Louis
V. A New experience
VI. Adopted and sent to school
VII. Back at last to the Lone Star State
VIII. Learning to rope wild steers
IX. Owning my first cattle
X. A start up the Chisolm trail
XI. Buys a boat and becomes a sailor
XII. Back to my favorite occupation, that of a wild and woolly Cow Boy
XIII. Mother and I meet at last
XIV. On a tare in Wichita, Kansas
XV. A lonely trip down the Cimeron
XVI. My first experience roping a Buffalo
XVII. An exciting trip after thieves
XVIII. Seven weeks among Indians
XIX. A lonely ride of eleven hundred miles
XX. Another start up the Chisolm trail
XXI. A trip which terminated in the capture of “Billy the Kid”
XXII. Billy the Kid’s capture
XXIII. A trip to the Rio Grande on a mule
XXIV. Waylaid by unknown parties
XXV. Lost on the Staked Plains
XXVI. A trip down the Reo Pecos
XXVII. A true sketch of “Billy the Kid’s” life
XXVIII. Wrestling with a dose of Small Pox on the Llano Esticado
XXIX. In love with a Mexican girl
XXX. A sudden leap from Cow Boy to Merchant

Addenda:
Part I. – Cost of raising a three-year old steer
Part II. – Driving young steers “up the trail.”
Part III. – What a young man can do in ten years with a start of 100 two-year-old heifers.
Part IV. – The much abused cow-pony.
Part V. – Cow-boys’ wages – and cost of outfit.
Part VI. – Losses on a cattle ranch from deaths, theft, etc.
Part VII. – Raising cow-ponies on the range

Explanatory Notes

Richard W. Etulain is professor emeritus of history and former director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico. He has authored or edited more than forty books.US

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